The most worrying of all the horrific developments in recent days is what’s happening in the West Bank — and the possibility of a return of suicide bombings to city centers. According to IDF briefings, since October 7, IDF and Shin Bet operations have been holding back a flood of terror that is on the verge of breaking through. Hundreds of attacks, thousands of arrests, hundreds of militants killed, and soldiers at risk almost every night. At best, that’s a superficial description of the situation.
It’s clear that terrorists are being arrested and attacks foiled, but the necessity of mass arrests is questionable. It’s well known that quite a few detainees were arrested for very little — a Facebook post or a comment — and their detention has mainly produced harm and centers of resentment. The point is that in Gaza, the army is willing to go far in applying pressure for a hostage deal — with an unusual public message from the Chief of Staff and others about the need for a deal and a willingness to withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor — whereas in the West Bank, the main message remains military force and more military force.
It’s worth recalling one of the most resonant lessons from the “Lone Wolf Intifada” of 2015–2016. While no analogy is perfect, back then there was also high motivation, attacks had begun, and there was also a right-wing government under Benjamin Netanyahu. The heads of the security establishment, led by Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, persuaded the government to apply a minimum of collective punishment: Palestinian workers continued to enter Israel, the IDF did not launch mass arrests, and it tried to allow Palestinians to live as normally as possible. The result: knife attacks didn’t escalate into suicide bombings in city centers, and the intifada subsided until it was halted.
For months now, the security establishment has believed that workers from the territories should be allowed into Israel. In vain. Netanyahu, under pressure from extremists in his government and fueled by the lie about the activity of workers from Gaza before October 7, doesn’t dare approach that idea. Since October 7, it’s been an accepted “truth” everywhere: some of the workers from Gaza, whom Israel generously allowed to work inside the Green Line, exploited our goodwill to collect intelligence for Hamas’s massacre. The head of Unit 504 addressed the matter in a briefing to reporters, as did the Shin Bet in the cabinet. In both cases, the units that interrogated thousands of militants, workers, and collaborators said there was no evidence to support this claim. That didn’t stop the lie from taking hold.
And it’s not just about letting workers in. A normal government would be speaking with the leaders of the Palestinian Authority. Mahmoud Abbas may have written a Holocaust-denying paper 40 years ago and made infuriating statements against us, but he is a Palestinian leader — now weak and unpopular, partly because of us — who is willing to talk to us, perhaps willing to take some responsibility in Gaza, and whose security apparatus still helps thwart terror. Yet we refuse to let him visit Gaza, boycott him, and claim he’s just Hamas in more diplomatic clothing.
From Smotrich and Ben Gvir’s government, no one expects otherwise. But it’s reasonable to expect that the army — and the media — would consider that not only military force can thwart terror, but that political arrangements and economic incentives can as well. The last 11 months should be enough to teach even the most thick-skinned in Zion that our power also has limits. We bombed, killed, crushed, flattened, arrested, used our full might plus an American airlift — and yet our security situation is worse than ever.
Netanyahu likes to say that every territory we withdrew from turned into a terrorist den. More accurate would be to say that every territory we withdrew from unilaterally became a terror zone, and that every political agreement has endured: Egypt, Jordan, even partial agreements with Syria. On October 5, 1973, there was massive public opposition in Israel to withdrawing from Sinai. By September 1978, at Camp David, the situation was completely different. It seems that we, too, understand only force.